Thursday, March 24, 2011

BOAT - Dress Like Your Idols

BOAT mainstay D. Crane is archetypal of a certain sort of thirtysomething indie dude. He's brainy and at least somewhat socially conscious (he served half of a two-year stint in Teach for America), he knows his way around music-friendly metropolises (currently living in Seattle, he did his TFA time in Chicago), and he can certainly identify with The Boston Globe sports writer Chad Finn's excellent blog about classic sports cards (BOAT's 2008 Topps 7" EP came with five hand-drawn cards, plus a stick of bubblegum). Crane's band, meanwhile, has been working on the fringes of the indie rock mainstream, receiving generally positive reviews.

BOAT's fourth album, then, finds the Crane-fronted four-piece going through something of an underachiever's quarter-life crisis. On one hand, Dress Like Your Idols sees Crane, drummer Jackson Long, bassist/guitarist Mark McKenzie, and multi-instrumentalist Josh Goodman finally making their way into a real studio for the first time. On the other hand, that studio-- Seattle's Two Sticks Audio-- is already defunct. And the songs, like the album cover, are as inspired by the band's youth as ever, merging Stephen Malkmus's obliquely deadpan twang, Tullycraft's sugary scene-skewering, and Modest Mouse's "reptile boy" yelp. Where some slightly younger slackers have been opting for warped 1980s synth-pop, BOAT continue to love the 90s: an era when they didn't know, as per the rueful title track, that "the job you wanted doesn't exist." The result is the best album yet from a band whose style finally appears to be back in vogue, though its sometimes-bitterly sardonic humor still won't be for everybody.

When BOAT apply their new-found professionalism, Dress Like Your Idols outdresses more than just famously schlubby Doug Martsch, whose Built to Spill is one of nine bands paid tribute to on the album's memorably meta cover. First single "(I'll Beat My Chest Like) King Kong" sets a basic pop hook ("I'll love you if you love me") over crunchy guitars and boisterous drumming that could please fans of such similarly 90s-minded bands as Surfer Blood, Yuck, or Free Energy (remember, the 90s also loved the 70s: Weezer, people!). John Roderick, whose underrated group the Long Winters gets its own album-cover homage, adds his drowsy, Pedro the Lion-ish backing vocals to "Landlocked", the record's screeching, pent-up emotional centerpiece. As Crane sarcastically boasts elsewhere, "If looks could kill, I'd slaughter you."

While the caustic, slightly self-pitying edge to PBR-pumping power-pop anthems like "Classically Trained" (which targets those lucky souls "making art for a living") and "Kinda Scared of Love Affairs" (which begins, almost a cappella, "I'm not sure I want to be good-looking") may put a few people off, it's hard to fault the successfully bombastic execution for anything except cozy familiarity. "In time you'll become a cynic," hyper-referential "When Frank Black Says (No. 14 Baby)" warns, adding, "We're just like you." When Dress Like Your Idols transcends the archetypal 30-ish indie dude's perhaps understandable cynicism, BOAT resemble their heroes in more ways than one. That's why the most revealing lyric, ultimately, turns out to be this: "Nothing seems impossible to me."